Jean Leonard Teganya on Trial

On 6 April 1994, the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their top military staff and six French crew members were assassinated when surface-to-air missiles shot down the Rwandan presidential jet on approach to Kigali airport. It is now well established that the assassination plot that decapitated the Hutu-led governments was executed by Rwanda’s now president and strongman-for-life, then Major General Paul Kagame, commander of the terrorist Tutsi-Hima army that invaded Rwanda from Uganda.

Now, 25 years later, while Kagame and the Rwanda genocide industry commemorate the 25th anniversary of the so-called 100 days of genocide, U.S. taxpayers continue to pay millions of dollars for yet another bogus asylum show trial targeting another genocide survivor and fugitive from the terrorist Kagame regime. Meanwhile, reporting on the trial in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts, the Boston newspapers have not challenged the vested-interests of their quoted sources or the machinations of the Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration & Customs Enforcement.

The wreckage of the presidential Mystere Falcon airplane, shot down on approach to Kigali airport on 6 April 1994, at rest after air-to-surface missiles caused it to crash into the presidential compound. Photo by Cranimer, New Vision newspaper, Kampala, Uganda.

Jean Leonard Teganya, 46, is a wanted man who has spent much of his adult life trying to start over and recover from the atrocities he survived in Rwanda.

Teganya was a medical student who volunteered at the hospital in Butare, Rwanda in the spring of 1994, treating the sick and wounded when no doctors or nurses were available (due to the large numbers of casualties).

Mr. Teganya was also a victim of the violence in 1994, rescued by fellow students after being attacked by an armed militia in Butare. He fled Butare around 20 June 1994, after killings intensified in the region in parallel with the arrival of the Rwandan Patriotic Army.

In June of 1994 Mr. Teganya fled Rwanda during the mass exodus of some 2 million Rwandans to neighboring countries. Mr. Teganya ended up in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) at Nyakavogo, a (mostly) Hutu refugee camp that in September of 1996 was attacked by Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) in violation of international humanitarian law.

A trial in a federal court in Boston commenced against Jean Leonard Teganya on 11 March 2019. Photographs of the scars of his wounds were shown to the Boston jury by the attorneys from the public defenders office that are representing him.

Witnesses for the prosecution, flown in from Rwanda for the trial in Boston, swore under oath that Mr. Teganya wore the hats, shirts and scarves of the ‘extremist Hutu’ parties. Prosecution witnesses described in great detail the insignia that was on Mr. Teganya’s hat: a machete and tool. He helped commit genocide, the U.S. prosecutors and immigration agents in Boston said, then tried to claim asylum.

“‘The defendant had a problem,’ Assistant US Attorney Scott L. Garland told a jury in US District Court in Boston during opening arguments in the trial against Teganya,’ reported the Boston Globe. ‘His problem was that his application for asylum would be denied if the US found out what he had done in Rwanda, because persecutors cannot claim asylum.'”

More than two weeks of hearings later, witnesses for the defense described Mr. Teganya as an amicable, quiet man devoted to helping other people. They described an intelligent, sensitive and caring fellow student who did not participate in party politics. More than 15 witness stated under oath that Jean Leonard Teganya never wore the signature clothing of the more radical Hutu political parties.

Where and how were the Rwandan prosecution witnesses to Mr. Teganya’s alleged crimes identified and who identified them? These are some of the pivotal questions that an ICE agent on the witness stand at Mr. Teganya’s trial was unable or unwilling to answer with conviction.

Did the ICE agent commit perjury?

Hutu, Death Agents, Have Becomes Its Victims

As the cataclysm unfolded in Rwanda in 1994, the western media reported from behind the RPA lines. The RPA narrative became the mainstream establishment narrative (that remains the predominant one): Tutsis as victims, Hutus as killers.

When the United Nations High Commission for Refugees special rapporteur Robert Gersony reported on the RPA’s widespread killing of scores of thousands of Hutu inside Rwanda, the report was squashed: all Hutus were killers, all Tutsis were victims. Gersony went silent and stayed silent.

As a survivor of the mass atrocities and genocide that occurred in his home country of Rwanda during the civil war, Jean Leonard Teganya was one of millions of innocent non-combatant Rwandans uprooted and driven from his homeland.

Forced to flee at the age of 21, from one country to another, he was for all practical purposes a fugitive from injustice (at the hands of the RPA), forced to survive or perish under the constant nagging memory of the horrors that he witnessed and the threat of arrest and persecution by the current regime in Rwanda.

His real crimes? He is a Hutu. He is an intellectual. He is a survivor. He had a U.S. government issued work permit and (for over two years) he was working at a prestigious university.

Mr. Teganya persevered in finding a new home, building a new life, raising a family.

And the worst crime of all? Jean Leonard Teganya was on the path of gaining asylum in the United States of America.

When president Paul Kagame and his Directorate of Military Intelligence in Rwanda learned that Mr. Teganya was legally employed as a laboratory technician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge Massachusetts, and that Mr. Teganya was about to gain legal U.S. residency status through the formal immigration process, they set about manufacturing a case against him.

The RPA slaughtered hundreds of thousands of unarmed non-combatant Rwandans–mostly Hutu women, children and elders–and also uncountable Congolese citizens during the Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of Zaire in 1996 and 1997.

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